Common SEO mistakes

I know, I know… Two days in a row, but Neil Patel has a great post on “5 SEO Mistakes that Crush Rankings” over at QuickSprout.com. If you are building sites or are wondering why your current sites aren’t ranking well this could help. There is also a link to the SEOMoz SEO Beginner Guide which is well worth the time to read.

I know I am guilty of one or more of these on each site I build :( Let me know where you fall and any tips you might have in the comments!

Also, John Chow has an innovative idea for link building today - check it out if you use WordPress.

Domain Name Marketing

Neil Patel has a great post on Marketing Tactics over at QuickSprout.com. If you are selling domain names or anything else online it is worth a quick read.

Especially relevant is the long tail discussion because you can relate it to domain name long tails pretty easily.  Let me know what you think of his ideas and which ones you already follow in the comments!

7 surprising Domain Name sales methods – part 5

This is Part 5 of 7 in my series on 7 surprising Domain Name sales methods. If you missed Part 4, you can find it here.

Just to recap, this is all about Making money online with domain names by selling your domain name in unique ways – we’ll cover other monetization methods in another series.

Domain name sales method #5:

Domaining forums

Yes, I know the forums are primarily other domainers and the vast majority of the stuff you will find there is junk, but you can find some deals if you check every few days… This is about selling domains though, and one place most people forget about is the “Domain Names Wanted” section of the Forums.

Domain Name Wanted

Domain Name Wanted

I have posted countless PM’s to Namepros and DNForum requests and although I’ve gotten a few leads, most are no thanks… Until recently.

I replied to a wanted post for a name about a month ago and the person said it was overpriced and wasn’t just right and would take it off my hands for much less so I said No Deal and just forgot about it.

Weeks went by and I got an email about the same domain with a low offer and rejected it, but was happy it was getting some interest. A couple more days and I get a PM with a much better offer which I accepted after a bit of negotiation (and asking if the email was the same person, which it was.)

All in all, I don’t know if the time I’ve spent lurking the wanted section makes up for the sale, but they do lead to sales for some people and in this case it was one of mine! The moral to this story is just because you get rejected a LOT, don’t give up and eventually you will succeed.

Good luck if you try this tip for selling domain names! Domain name sales method #6 is coming soon!

~~ DomainNitro ~~

7 surprising Domain Name sales methods – part 4

This is Part 4 of 7 in my series on 7 surprising Domain Name sales methods. If you missed Part 3, you can find it here.

Just to recap, this is all about Making money online with domain names by selling your domain name in unique ways – we’ll cover other monetization methods in another series.

Domain name sales method #4:

Email “hell” leads to heaven!

I had a domain that I was going to put a mini-site on recently and one of the steps I always take is to have an email address for that domain. I use that email for domain sales emails, contact info on the site, etc. BTW, GoDaddy used to, and maybe still does give you a free email account with each domain so I have lots of email accounts waiting to be used for just this situation.

Domain Name sales email

I set the email up one night and logged into the following day to send out a couple of sales letters and there were several emails waiting in my inbox. Now, normally that isn’t a big deal since spammers send email to domains, domain registrant contact info and the like, but these emails were all in Spanish and about half of them looked legitimate so I used the translate tab in Google and verified one of them was legitimate.

The Google translation also revealed the email chain and this one had been forwarded so I could see the history and the person had typed the address incorrectly. The address they really wanted was somebody@mydomain.com.es. I always set the email up as a catchall so I got these emails and realized the company might want the .com and this would give them a concrete example as to why.

I crafted a quick email to them and forwarded an email I had received and within a few days we had worked out a deal. The great thing is I never had to do much research of potential buyers or anything so I didn’t waste any time getting the sale! Just wish I had done it sooner!

Who knows if this method will ever work again, but I plan on setting up several more email accounts this weekend.

Good luck if you try this tip for selling domain names! Domain name sales method #5 is here now!

~~ DomainNitro ~~

7 surprising Domain Name sales methods – part 3

This is Part 3 of 7 in my series on 7 surprising Domain Name sales methods. If you missed Part 2, you can find it here.

Just to recap, this is all about Making money online with domain names by selling your domain name in unique ways – we’ll cover other monetization methods in another series.

Domain name sales method #3:

Recognize odd traffic patterns for parked domains

Whenever you park domains you should get some traffic from type-ins (if you don’t, you might not have a very good domain but that is off topic.) Oftentimes you will see heavier than expected traffic and many domainers look for these type of domains. Usually they were previously developed and have backlinks that are still driving traffic to the domain. This post is not about that :)

What I’m suggesting here is to look for traffic that is new and increasing or is steady and the domain was never developed. You can find this information easily by looking at your parking company month over month stats. Oftentimes this will not be because you hand registered some fantastic domain, but in reality someone is developing a site and people are typing in your domain name in error. This is especially true if you own the .com.

Parking sign image

Domain Parking

Late last year one of my domains went from about 30 uniques per month to 100 to consistently over 500. A quick Google search found that a site was developed and was advertising heavily for another tld. Great for me because I was getting additional clicks, but it still wasn’t a lot of money so I sent exactly one message to the site owner through their contact page and had a sale closed very quickly.

If I hadn’t parked the domain or kept up with the stats I never would have been able to make that sale because the owner thought that once a domain was “his” it was always “his” and applied that same logic to the .com I had parked – he had seen the site, but missed the “this domain may be for sale” link on the parked page I guess. Maybe he would have figured it out eventually, but at the very least I expedited the sale!

Good luck if you try this tip for selling domain names! Domain name sales method #4 is here now!

~~ DomainNitro ~~

Domain name sales are increasing?

If the first 3 weeks of the year are any indication then 2011 is going to be a great year for Domain Name sales! 

I’m already closing in on the same number of sales I had all of Q4 last year and interest has been very high on several other domain names I have for sale.  It has slowed down my blogging and development projects, but I’ll take that any day!  I have Part 3, 4 and 5 of the surprising sales series almost done so be on the lookout for those tomorrow!

I hope your domain name sales or however you make money online is picking up as well.  I’d love to hear how other areas of online sales are going so drop me a line and let me know!

7 surprising Domain Name sales methods – part 2

This is Part 2 of 7 in my series on 7 surprising Domain Name sales methods. If you missed Part 1, you can find it here.

Just to recap, this is all about Making money online with domain names by selling your domain name in unique ways – we’ll cover other monetization methods in another series.

Domain name sales method #2:

Use the “Tell-a-Woman”

Now this is not specifically about networking and building relationships in the traditional sense and before you send that complaint email or post hate comments please realize this concept has been around a long time and was coined by Tex Williams back in the 40’s. Cue the twangy background music:

“DON’T TELEPHONE, DON’T TELEGRAPH, TELL A WOMAN”

If you want to spread the news
There are lots of ways to use
But the ordinary ways are much too slow.

There is just one thing to do
Here is my advice to you
Confidentially it’s the fastest way I know.

Don’t telephone don’t telegraph
Tell a woman and the news will get around.

This holds true today even in the times of FaceBook, Twitter and Texting where you can communicate with hundreds or thousands of people in almost real time. It doesn’t even have to be a woman, but generally it is someone who you may know who fits the following… You’re having a conversation at dinner with a group of people and you are interupted 3 times in an hour by someone stopping by who saw person X at your table – they literally know everyone… or it could be someone you go to when you have a question because they “know everybody”…

Domain Name Networking

These people are invaluable friends, but they can also be a help in your online business and in selling domains. If you are like me, you’ll buy some random domains at some point because they have great search numbers/CPC, but you have no idea what you’re going to do with them. I had one like this that was about to expire and even though I liked the name I hadn’t actively tried to sell it and I wasn’t going to renew it because I just knew it was going to take a while and a lot of work/time to get the necessary contacts.

Well, we had dinner with a few friends recently and two of them are the classic Tellawoman, including being female, and they were chatting about someone taking a new job and it was in the exact area of my domain. They were able to put me in contact with that person and effectively lent me their authority and network of people and I sold a domain that I would otherwise have dropped and just lost the money.

Once again, this took almost no effort on my part and you can’t beat that for simplicity because it only took a few minutes time. Now, I wouldn’t suggest overusing this one – mostly because I hate pushy people and I surely don’t friend/choose to hang out with people I know are just pushing me to buy their junk, but used sparingly I think it is surprisingly effective… Just don’t be “that guy/girl” – nobody likes that. Oh, and if you are offended by the reference, I apologize in advance – doesn’t make it any less true though.
:)

Good luck if you try this tip for selling domain names and look for Domain name sales method #3 here!

~~ DomainNitro ~~

SEO and great content idea

I’ve been working out how to ramp up content on some sites, but don’t want to farm much due to the lack of quality I’ve seen where I’d have to rewrite most of the content which defeats the purpose.  Since I know I can’t do it all, I was pleasantly surprised to see a really nice article over on GigaOM.com regarding content and SEO.


They basically take the path of Wikipedia or any of the old school Q/A sites.  This seems like a novel approach, but when people are truly interested in a topic they will volunteer their opinions and input freely.  They will also take more pride in what they write and give excellent content! 

That is the same effect you see in great forums where you have passionate people who love the topic – think cameras, sports like college football, apple products, etc.  People spend hours and hours surfing, commenting and posting new content all on their own time!

SEO Content

SEO Content Creators

The more recent technical development and evolution of Forums is an expansion of what were thought of as communities at one time – I’m talking about Facebook! You can’t get a more engaged, dynamic, content creation machine than a few hundred million people banging around a site every day!

Now if I can figure out how to transfer this concept on a smaller scale to find and persuade people to contribute content to things I’m interested in it will solve all my problems!

Take a look at the post – nothing groundbreaking, but it sure got some thoughts cooking about how to engage people and get them to participate in a site!

Domain Names available to register for free

Found some old notes on some research I was doing a few months ago and found several domains currently still available to hand register. Let me know if you pick any of them up – they aren’t the greatest, but some of them could be monetized pretty easily.

CANDYSTORES.ORG
CASINONIAGARA.ORG
CODEGENERATOR.US
CREMEBRULEE.US
FREEWEBCAMCHATROOMS.ORG
QUILTINGSUPPLIES.US
FOURWHEELING.US
CONTEMPORARYCHRISTIANMUSIC.US
PLAYHALO.ORG
INDUCTIONCOOKER.US

7 surprising Domain Name sales methods – part 1

Making money online with domain names has to ultimately end with the sale of your domain name. Technically, not true, you can monetize it, but that is another story. 

This article series is all about selling domain names to make money – ie, buy low and sell high! More specifically, these are 7 tips for selling you might not have heard of and even if you had, you didn’t try because they sounded too simple. My criteria is that they are not the normal channel of researching and contacting buyers and more importantly you can implement them very easily – 10 minutes or less in most cases! 

A little background… Many people are good with finding domain names available to register, catching expiring domains or buying names that are decently priced. There are also tons of tools to help you find a good name as well as very creative people who can make up a name and just hand register it. There are always new trends emerging you can capitalize upon by buying names early (bluray, hdtv, iphone, etc).

The problem comes when you get ready to sell your domain name. Most people are just not good at it – it is a lot easier and a lot more fun registering names than it is researching potential buyers, making sales calls and negotiating with people. 

So the following list of 7 sales has come from my direct experience and is much easier than the normal sales process – ie, not as much work. Not saying you can get rich with domain names this way, because I don’t think you can. What I am saying is that these were pretty easy to do and took very little time and I actually sold domains that otherwise wouldn’t have sold at all or at least not as quickly. 

Domain name sales method #1:

Domain Name Whois lookups

Generally people who are running whois lookups on your domain are either researching it to see when it will expire or to contact the owner in some way. Often it is for spam, but many people interested in buying a domain will have their techies look as well and many of those people will look at your whois. Why not make it easy for them and list your domain for sale as part of the contact information in addition to making sure your real contact information is correct, which it is, right? 

Just last week, I had someone check the whois and saw that I had “This domain is for sale. Email me now!” on the second address line. We chatted briefly and a sales price was agreed to in a few minutes. Payment was made and the domain was transferred within a couple hours of the first contact. 

Domain Name DNS Entry with sales text

 

You can’t beat that for simplicity because it only took a couple seconds to add that line to all of my domains with GoDaddy as you can do a mass edit of the dns entries. Here is an example of one of my listings – like I said – it is simple, but in this case effective! Not that I want to sell this domain so that is only an example, but you get the idea. 

Good luck if you try this tip for selling domain names!   Part 2 of this Domain name sales method series is now out! 

~~ DomainNitro ~~